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PHILHARMONIA/HAZLEWOOD
Andrew Clements
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 15 June 2010 22.00 BST
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Alan Hovhaness is one of the most enigmatic of 20th-century American
music mavericks. He was prolific - over 400 works, including 67
symphonies - but until Richard Thompson included Hovhaness's music in
his Meltdown programme, he had never been performed at the Southbank
Centre.
Hovhaness, who died in 2000, was of Armenian descent, and after the
second world war his music began to take on ideas from the Middle East
and east Asia, as two of the pieces played by the Philharmonia under
Charles Hazlewood demonstrated. The Fantasy On Japanese Wood Prints,
from 1965, effectively a single-movement concerto for xylophone
(though the soloist, Colin Currie, played a marimba), has moments of
japonaiserie - a piccolo imitating a shakuhachi, pentatonic ideas
and microtones - but its rhetoric and frieze-like construction are
profoundly western.
The feeling that Hovhaness's exoticism was skin-deep was confirmed
by The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a work from 1975 apparently being
performed for the first time in 20 years. Gobbets of the poems, recited
by Omid Djalili, are interleaved with orchestral interludes in which
an accordion features prominently; there's no sense of development
or form, and the music is decorative in a cheesy, movie-score way.
The most convincing work dated from 1946, before Hovhaness is
reckoned to have found his true voice - The Prayer of St Gregory,
which embroiders a solo trumpet on a cushion of strings in a style
somewhere between Barber's Adagio and the Tallis Fantasia. Brief and
haunting, it at least connected with the works by Vaughan Williams
also included in the programme.
Richard Thompson's Meltdown continues until Monday. Full coverage:
From: A. Papazian
Andrew Clements
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 15 June 2010 22.00 BST
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Alan Hovhaness is one of the most enigmatic of 20th-century American
music mavericks. He was prolific - over 400 works, including 67
symphonies - but until Richard Thompson included Hovhaness's music in
his Meltdown programme, he had never been performed at the Southbank
Centre.
Hovhaness, who died in 2000, was of Armenian descent, and after the
second world war his music began to take on ideas from the Middle East
and east Asia, as two of the pieces played by the Philharmonia under
Charles Hazlewood demonstrated. The Fantasy On Japanese Wood Prints,
from 1965, effectively a single-movement concerto for xylophone
(though the soloist, Colin Currie, played a marimba), has moments of
japonaiserie - a piccolo imitating a shakuhachi, pentatonic ideas
and microtones - but its rhetoric and frieze-like construction are
profoundly western.
The feeling that Hovhaness's exoticism was skin-deep was confirmed
by The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a work from 1975 apparently being
performed for the first time in 20 years. Gobbets of the poems, recited
by Omid Djalili, are interleaved with orchestral interludes in which
an accordion features prominently; there's no sense of development
or form, and the music is decorative in a cheesy, movie-score way.
The most convincing work dated from 1946, before Hovhaness is
reckoned to have found his true voice - The Prayer of St Gregory,
which embroiders a solo trumpet on a cushion of strings in a style
somewhere between Barber's Adagio and the Tallis Fantasia. Brief and
haunting, it at least connected with the works by Vaughan Williams
also included in the programme.
Richard Thompson's Meltdown continues until Monday. Full coverage:
From: A. Papazian